To: A Better Life

To: A Better life Devlog

Devlog: To: A Better a life

We are 3 students at the "School of Games - Cologne". For our second prototyping week we hade to take part in the "A MAZE" game jam you can find more information here: https://itch.io/jam/out-of-the-frame

We are a team of one artist (Samia) and two programmers (Mohammed, Daniel)Since Mohammed had personal experience with the topic of escaping by boat and came up with the idea to make a game out of this situation we went ahead and chose the current situation of thousands of people being forced to take the risk of losing their lifes and escape over the sea as our topic.

being forced to add the cloth component via code the paper animations now are a bit bouncier. The new camera angle is not respected in the code yet(it works with a fix point, to always have a nice background) so the camera transitions are not optimal

Next up: the string splitting issue(need to cut the string by words or lines not by characters) and a better way of reading mouse input.

different camera fix points and camera + paper focus points

maybe.. make a whole room and place the cam somewhere different each time?

make a whole room and place the cam somewhere different each time the user opens a paper, maybe even with some topic related places in the room?!? e.g. at the “burn the letter” moment jump to a candle ?

Some character sprites are orientated in the wrong direction for the wave effect

Wednesday

we made node based camera transitions for the scenes

Finally made it to give the procedural wave mesh uvs, but this brought up a bunch of new fine tuning tasks, also with the new skybox in mind

Thursday

We tried to find a fast way of updating to Samias new artwork for the desk scene - we lost a lot of time here but it was worth it. On the boat scene Mohammed implemented the progress bar and the rocks mechanics. Due to some merge issues only the progress bar made it in the scene for presentation.

Daniel tried to finish the camera transitions and character placements for the intro sequence.

During the last hours we noticed there was something going wrong with the depth of field effect values: We trigger depth of field changes to refocus for example in the desk scene when clicking on a page. But somehow the values seemed to have another effect on the depth of field inside Unity compared to the build version.

Friday

As the task included getting a playable version on itch.io at presentation we uploaded a version with so much blur in it. You could not clearly see the boat or the character sprites. We also missed a Unity dll library file in the first version so the game would not start.

As finding a solution for the depth of field bug seemed like it would take a lot of time by today we temporarily removed it from the game and uploaded a now working version.